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Today is the day that Frederick Douglass celebrated his birthday. He didn't know his actual birthday, but on one of the few times he was able to spend time with his mother as a child, she called him her "valentine."
He took that as a possible clue—one of the few he had. So he made February 14 his birthday.
Frederick Douglass's history was stolen from him, so he built his own. Starting with his birthday.
Another story: Douglass apparently once got up at a birthday event in his honor, organized by white supporters, and used his speech to chastise them for holding the event.
"What in the world have you been doing that for? Why Frederick Douglass? That day was taken from him long before he had the means of owning it. Birthdays belong to free institutions. We, at the South, never knew them."
"We were born at times: harvest times, watermelon times, and generally hard times. I never knew anything about the celebration of a birthday except Washington’s birthday, and it seems a little strange to have mine celebrated."
Here, as with "What to the slave is the Fourth of July," Douglass didn't hesitate to make audiences deeply uncomfortable by rejecting the premises of their gestures of support for him.
That move—that insistence that his white supporters sit with his criticism of them and their discomfort in that criticism—would have caught Douglass a hell of a lot of flak on Twitter.
But it's a tremendous, important, daring rhetorical strategy, and one in whose reflected discomfort a lot of us could bear to sit for a while, a century and a half later.
Getting publicly criticized by someone you admire isn't fun, and it isn't always fair. But it's not fatal, and it can be incredibly illuminating. Learning to sit there and take it—to process it and learn from it—is an essential life skill, most essential of all for an organizer.
